Service
SERVICE
PAUL DEAN
Failing the bar exam
Q While trailering my new 2006 Harley-Davidson Road Glide to the Ozarks from distant West Texas, the handlebar rotated downward into the tank, allowing the bike to lean over and rub against the trailer. All tolled, the damage to the bike was just under $1800. It seemed that the handlebar, which was movable by hand with little exertion, had not been not adequately tightened, so the accident should never have occurred in the first place.
After getting the runaround by the selling dealer, who claimed that they have no specific procedures for attaching motorcycles to trailers, my wife contacted H-D Customer Relations. The representative said, “Our bikes are meant to be ridden, not trailered.” She then went on to say that H-D’s Technical Department states that handlebars at no time should ever be used as tie-down points. How in the world is one supposed to tie down a bike if the handlebar isn’t an option? I would have thought that three pairs of soft ties, three pairs of ratchet tiedowns and a pair of Moose Ancra-style tiedowns would have been enough. How many of your readers with H-Ds currently use the handlebars as attachment points? Are Harleys more prone than other bikes to have their handlebars come loose?
Gregory Butler Posted on www.cycleworld.com
A When transporting a motorcycle of any kind, no amount or quality of tiedown equipment will keep the machine adequately secured if the parts of the bike to which the tiedowns are attached are not themselves secure. That’s one of the fundamental rules of trailering or trucking anything, motorcycle or otherwise. So any time you intend to use handlebars as attachment points, you should always check the bars’ tightness before hooking tiedowns on them.
On a bike without a fairing, it’s best to loop a soft tie around each side of the handlebar, not out at the grip end but inboard, close to the bar mount, then use those as the upper anchors for the tiedown straps. If you anchor the bike out at or near the grips, the pull of the tiedowns has a huge amount of leverage that can cause the bar to rotate downward as the trailer jounces down the road, even if the bar is reasonably tight in its mount. But if you anchor the bike on the straight part of the bar next to the clamp, the tiedowns cannot cause the bar to rotate in any direction.
On bikes with fairings, a tiedown usually can’t get a straight shot between the anchor on the trailer or truck floor and the inner part of the handlebar. In that case, loop a soft tie around each fork leg, just above the lower triple-clamp, then attach the tiedowns to them. Actually, that’s not a bad tiedown location for any bike, because it completely eliminates the possibility of moving the handlebars.
Then there’s the matter of ratchet tiedowns. These are very useful, but improperly used, they can cause more problems than they solve, especially if you attach them to the outer ends of the handlebar and then crank them down too tightly. You only need to tie a bike down firmly enough to keep it from falling over or slipping out of the frontwheel chock, not to survive a nuclear explosion. Overtightening can put undue stress on all of the tiedown points,
whether it’s those on the bike or the an-
chors on the trailer or truck.
Keep on rollin' on
QDoes the 40-60 mph “Top Gear Time to Speed” in your road tests mean that you literally put test bikes in top gear and, at 40 mph, time how long it takes to get to 60 mph? The reason I ask is that my 2003 Honda Shadow 1100 Spirit will barely pull 40 mph in top gear, so I have compared it to some bikes tested in past issues of Cycle World. In the August, 2003, issue in which you tested the 2004 Honda VTX1300, it says that the bike will pull top gear by 3000 rpm. I interpret this to mean 3000 rpm is the minimum rpm to use in top (fifth) gear. Yet in that same test’s specifications, it says that engine speed at 60 mph is 2980 rpm. It seems to me, then, that you couldn’t do the 40-60 mph Top Gear Time to Speed test because the bike wouldn’t pull 40 mph in top gear; at 40 mph, the engine would only be turning around 2000 rpm. Am I misinterpreting something here? I realize I’m comparing a different bike (VTX1300) to my 1100 Shadow, but my owner’s manual says I should shift into fifth gear at 31 mph, which on my bike would be close to 1700 rpm. This seems way too low of a speed for my engine to pull in top gear. Thanks for any insight you can give me. David Ficken Omaha, Nebraska
Aí believe you have misunderstood our use of the term “pull.” When we say that an engine will not pull below a certain road speed or rpm, we mean that the bike will not accelerate comfortably and willingly from that point. In practically all cases, the engine still accelerates but may do so too slowly to be productive; or if it is an engine that has uneven firing pulses, such as a
V-Twin, it may shudder so much as to be uncomfortable. But even if the engine shakes or struggles at 40 mph in top gear, we still conduct the 40-60mph acceleration test and report the results. If we would ever encounter a bike that refused to accelerate from 40 mph in top gear, we’d report that fact in the test and note it in the specifications. We want to give our readers-many of whom also are potential purchasers of the model in question-a strong sense of a bike’s overall performance, and top-gear tests are important pieces of that puzzle.
Having never read an 1100 Shadow owner’s manual, I can’t shed much light on its recommendation to shift into top gear at 31 mph. Sometimes, the true intent of the wording in owner’s manuals originally written in another country either gets lost in translation or is never communicated quite clearly in the first place. Perhaps that recommendation was intended as a guidance for initial breakin or as a means of obtaining the best fuel mileage, but that message was not made clear in the manual. Or maybe the intent is merely to identify the minimum speed at which top gear should be used.
In any event, if upshifting to top gear at 31 mph feels unnatural to you, here’s my extremely technical, deeply insightful recommendation that reflects practically everything I have learned in my 33 years of testing all kinds of motorcycles: Don’t do it.
Forking follies
QI have a 1989 Honda VT 11OOC Shadow that I’m restoring, and I’ve encountered a problem with the front end. The handlebar and fork line up properly, but the tire points off to the left. So when I’m riding in a straight line, the tire is pointed directly ahead but the handlebar and fork are turned slightly to the right. I took the bike to a dealer but they could not tell me the cause of the problem or how to correct it. Do you know what might be causing this misalignment and if it can be corrected?
Larry L. Smith
Landover, Maryland
A Yes, I know why the front wheel points in the wrong direction, and yes, it can be corrected. The problem is that the fork assembly either needs a simple alignment, which can be accomplished in a matter of minutes, or it has a bent fork tube, a bent triple-clamp or both. To perform the alignment, loosen all the fork-securing hardware (tripleclamp pinch bolts, axle nut, axle pinch bolts and steering stem top nut) but leave the triple-clamp fasteners just snug enough to prevent the tubes from sliding up through them. Standing in front of the bike and facing the headlight, firmly straddle the front wheel with your legs, grab the handlebars with your hands and twist the bars to your right until the wheel is lined up properly with the rest of the front end. Eyeball the alignment to the best of your ability, then tighten all the hardware and take the bike for a short test ride. If the handlebar and front wheel still are not square with one another, repeat the procedure until you either get them to align or determine that they will not do so-in which case, something indeed is bent.
To find out what’s out of whack, prop the bike up on a stand or a box so the front wheel is just barely touching the ground. Loosen all of the pinch bolts on both triple-clamps just far enough that you can turn the tubes with your hands, then rotate each tube in the clamps. If a tube is bent, you either won’t be able to rotate it a full 360 degrees, which means it has a significant bend, or it will have a tight spot that you can overcome with additional twisting force, which means it is only slightly bent. Ideally, bent tubes should be replaced; but if the bend is very mild, the tube can be straightened with a hydraulic press. If you choose that route, have the work performed by someone who not only has a press but also has experience in using it to straighten fork tubes. Based on the response you got from the people at your dealership, I seriously doubt they meet that criteria. So if you can’t find a qualified repair shop, play it safe and replace the tube.
If only one tube is bent, remove it and insert the straight tube into the bent one’s triple-clamp bores. If the tube slides up through the clamps without much resistance, the clamps are okay; if it does not, one or both of the clamps has been tweaked and should be replaced.
A glaring problem
QI recently purchased a 2006 Yamaha Stratoliner, and while cruising at night, the light in the speedometer housing makes a real nasty glare at eye level in the windshield. Is there anything out there in the aftermarket that would eliminate that glare? I don’t want to take the windshield off and neither do I want to stop riding at night. Maybe other riders have had this happen on their bikes and come up with an easy fix to stop the glare. If so, I would like to know what they have done. Andy Dewey
A Although we currently have a Stratoliner in our test fleet, I’ve not experimented with cures for its nighttime windshield glare. I’ve grown accustomed to dealing with reflections in windshields, as have other CW staffers, since it occurs on many bikes besides the Stratoliner.
I am, however, vaguely familiar with two remedies implemented by other riders (none of whom were riding Stratoliners) I’ve encountered out on the road. One was to re-angle the windshield at its mounting points so the reflection would not appear in the rider’s direct line of sight. Whether the shield needs to be angled farther inward or outward depends upon the motorcycle and windshield in question, as well as the height of the rider. Just be aware that re-angling a windshield may have a negative effect on the way air flows over and around the shield and makes contact with the rider.
Another rider’s homegrown solution was to cut a small piece of automotive windshield-tint material to fit over the instrument face, thereby reducing the intensity of the glare if not eliminating it altogether. This could, of course, impair the rider’s ability to read the instruments in the daylight, depending upon the darkness of the tint. I’ve seen this approach on two different motorcycles, and the rider of one of them told me he intended to fabricate a removable tinted “mask” of sorts that would attach to the steel instrument bezel with small magnets so it could be installed at night and taken off during the day. I have no personal experience with any of these methods, though, so I cannot vouch for their effectiveness or practicality.
